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Sunday, October 27, 2013

I remember reading, some time ago, about a guy who had a large
South American python. Not one of our Australian carpet snakes but one of
those big ones that make ours look like garden worms. It turns out that he
raised it from a baby and they got on like a house on fire: not sure how they
did walkies and that sort of thing but they were friends. That is, until one
night he woke up with the beast wrapped around him and it’s jaws over the top
of his head. It seems that no matter what he thought his relationship was with
his friend, it was still a python. And I guess, you should always remember to
feed your pets: otherwise they get annoyed.

A question I get asked a lot is whether or not it is
possible to change someone’s personality. This is often in the context of a
relationship or at work, and especially about those in leadership positions,
where someone’s behaviour is posing problems. And mostly it is of the type,
‘Please can you sprinkle some fairy dust on them and make them into somebody
else’. Fair question and often asked in a moment of quiet desperation, of the
Thoreau kind.

By definition personality is tricky to shift, given it is a
set of enduring traits. These traits define patterns of behavioural and
emotional responses to events. The sticking point is the word ‘enduring’: they
are rather persistent. So the short answer is that it often takes something
impressively confronting, even catastrophic, to change a strong personality
trait. As the old joke goes, How many psychologists does it take to change a light
bulb? The answer is ‘one’ but the light bulb has to want to change.

Changing a personality trait is not as easy as changing a
single behaviour or even several behaviours. So, for example, a person might
have a tendency towards being what in the Big 5 is called Conscientiousness.
People high on this trait like to be planned, make lists, tend to take great
care about things, like facts and are systematic. A person, like me, who is low
on this trait is the opposite. So, I might be able to force myself to make
plans and lists, to use spread sheets and Gantt charts, but I’d rather not. It
is stressful for me. But it is unlikely that I would ever become high on the
trait as I am likely to avoid work or relationships where I would be required
to be high on Conscientiousness. And I am unlikely to ever change from being an
extravert. But I can curb my tendency to ‘think out loud’ in meetings, for
example, and to recognise that I need to give introverts time to process
information before expecting an answer.

We can modify traits when they are more marginal and when
desire is strong. Under stress, however, there is a tendency to revert back to
our previous predilections. It can be hard work changing ones traits, being
aware all the time of what we are doing, catching ourselves so that we don’t
slip and then applying the new behaviour. If the behaviour becomes a habit then
we are well on the way to permanent change. So, yes, it’s possible to tinker
around the edges, which is what happens with the massive industry around
personality profiling, coaching and leadership programs.

One of the more difficult tasks I get as a psychologist, and
the most frustrating, is working with people who don’t understand the impact
they have on people around them. Because they have no insight into their own
personality, they don’t have any chance of knowing what they are doing. When we
are confronted by our real ‘self’ humans have a tendency to get defensive, to
protect the ego. So getting insight can be a difficult business. It takes a
rather special event to get beyond this barrier and it can be quote painful.
People who have had personality disorders throughout their life and who
eventually start to get insight later in life can be more prone to turn to
alcohol or even self-harm when they realise the havoc they have created in
their life was of their own making.

So, what can you do: about that over-controlling person at
work or in a relationship: with someone
who cannot plan at all and is always in chaos: when your boss is agreeable
(another Big 5 trait) that he avoids making decisions because he is too busy
socialising; about the extrovert who will never stop talking and seems to
change their mind in the middle of a conversation; to help someone who is so
closed to new experiences that they cannot see the value of new innovations and
creative staff; and about the manipulative bully?

The answer is, not a great deal other than quietly lead them
to understanding the impact of their behaviour if you have a close relationship
with them, or to confront them head on. Both of these approaches can be
problematic and occasionally may work. In the end, though, the motivation to
change has to be present and even then the task may not be easy.

Having said that, the recent work on training the brain and
evidence-based psychological methods have been shown to work, where the person
recognises the need to change and are prepared to put in the work.

Saturday, October 12, 2013

I recently asked a group of young parents to pose a moral
dilemma to their children aged between the ages of 6 and 8 or so. Not a
scientific experiment you understand but curious nonetheless and I kind of knew
the answer. The dilemma was around whether or not a teacher should give a
certain child a negative school report. The child had been very naughty, was
not doing her reading assignments and so on. The problem was that the child was
related closely to a very powerful person who could cause the teacher to lose
her job or at least get into trouble. What should the child do?

Well, the overwhelming response from 9 kids was that she
should tell the truth. It is a rather well known that kids have a rather well
developed moral compass at a relatively young age for a lot of reasons. Not
least of these is that they have learned good moral responses from reading
stories and parents tend to be pretty good about reinforcing the right and
wrong message.

However, there is something that happens when we get to
adulthood. Somehow the moral GPS gets a bit off course. This seems particularly
true, although not exclusive, to organisational life.

It is fascinating to me that many organisations, without a
hint of irony, flash words around their websites and strategic plans like
integrity, honesty, doing the right thing, values, truth and so on from the Dictionary
of Ethics smorgasbord. Yet, when it comes to telling the boss that he or she
has a zit on their nose, or even worse, criticising the behaviour of senior
people or the organisation itself as a whole, the powerful wind of
self-interest, of fear, sweeps all before it.

There are two aspects to this of course. The first is that
many managers are not very good at accepting criticism. To be fair, this is a
normal human condition. We are all narcissistic to a degree and being
criticised is a hard thing to accept. But one might think that being able to be
self-reflective is a pre-requisite to being in a management role. Even more
important, at least from an organisational point of view, is the need to
improve organisational effectiveness for survival and to prevent disaster.

What can happen, and happens more often than it should, is
that managers shift from defensiveness to attack and divert the criticism
elsewhere: often towards the victims (if there are any) or the conveyer of the
message. Again this is normal human behaviour but one would expect a higher
level of sophistication among, particularly, senior managers. In fact,
emotional maturity should be a pre-requisite. Interestingly this is not a trait
seen in the emotional intelligence literature. But I digress. There are other
defence mechanisms of course including denial, rationalisation, and so on, but
projection is by far the most commonly used not just by managers but by people
in everyday life.

The second issue has to do with our willingness to state
what may well not be received well. This requires a think called courage. And,
as one might expect is part of the moral menu of many organisations. Now, in
the wrong environment (see above) this can be a real difficulty and who could
blame one for not being prepared to speak up? Interesting dilemma and I wonder
what the kids would say. The other side to the coin is why would one want to
work in an organisation that didn’t stick to its values, that was a moral
vacuum and where there was no willingness to learn and improve. Who wants to
live in the organisational equivalent of a gulag?

Having been an organisational consultant for many years the
moral dimension of what we do can be very confronting too. Sometimes, and inevitably,
one is placed in a position where deciding to take on a particular piece of
work or reporting issues that will not be received well can challenge one’s
personal integrity and values. After all, one has to work. Now at the end of my
working life I am less concerned about this than I used to be and am rather
more inclined to walk away or to bell the cat if required than I was when I was
much younger-and hungrier. It is naturally and normally human to think about
one’s own survival.

The biggie of course is where is the line on compromising
oneself? On compromising one’s organisation? Elephants in the room can be
pretty scary fellows. It can be really ugly when you are the source of the
elephant.

But as parents, what would we advise our children to do when
faced with a moral dilemma or how to deal with criticism? Seems a reasonable
benchmark to me if we are going to overcome our tendency to narcissism and
self-interest.

Thursday, October 3, 2013

I’ve never been much of a fan of Senge and his book the
Fifth Discipline largely because he didn’t attribute much of his work to some
important non-Americans such as Russell Ackoff, and Fred Emery, among others.
However, he simplified the notion that people are largely habitual in the way
they think with his idea of ‘mental models’. It does seem the case that humans
get a way of behaving in their head and then have a lot of trouble changing it,
even if what they are doing is not working for them. Sometimes people don’t
even see that they are the cause of the problem: the trees are definitely in
the way of seeing the forest.

It’s pretty amazing that many CEOs, senior executives and
managers all the way down the food chain don’t understand some fundamental
things they need to do to improve employee engagement. This, despite the
overwhelming evidence that low engagement results in low productivity, poorer
quality output and, where it is an issue, poor safety behaviour. For those more
familiar with the term employee engagement is similar to job satisfaction and
both share similar factors in the various measurement tools used to evaluate
them.

I’ve come across a few organisations in the past few months
where ‘management’ consistently fail to engage their direct reports, their
‘team’, in the basic activities of: sharing purpose and making sure everyone is
singing from the same song sheet; shared strategic planning; shared review of
operations and achievement of the plan; participative decision-making; continuous
improvement; and problem solving. All of these are, along with the meeting of a
bunch of fundamental human needs, are known to increase employee engagement
and, its sequelae.

It seems that this failure of the basics of management
occurs for a number of reasons. The first is lack of knowledge: the manager
simply does not know anything about management and doesn’t know what to do.
This is the classic unconscious incompetence. The manager manages simply
bumbles along using a mental model they got from somewhere, usually watching
someone else who managed them. There has been no effort to learn anything about
management. The second is owning a mental model that was obtained from an
airport book shelf and that is now used for every situation. Mostly the model
is incomplete and the recipe is untested and tried. But, the manager persists,
believing that they have the right formula for success. This might be command
and control or micro-management, for example. The opposite turns out to be
true. In effect the mental model is poor. Next we have the person who just
happens to believe that humans are rather pathetic and that leaders are born
and not made. They have a divine right to lead and to be lord of their domain,
all powerful. This is one of a number of personality flaws that often dominate
the thinking of some managers and drive their behaviour. Then there is the
psychopath in its various forms, where the motive is personal gain, the
exaggeration of self, self-aggrandisement, power, and the manipulation of the
pawns on their personal chessboard.

In all cases, the science of human behaviour and what little
management science there is ignored or, at best, simply not accessed due to
ignorance. What is more interesting is that these problems can be pointed out
when there is a crisis relating to performance, staff turnover, or an employee
discontent but there is no effort to change. More often than not the manager or
CEO looks like a kangaroo caught in the headlights.

The science of managing people needs to be promoted and
management needs to be seen as a skill just like medicine, engineering or other
professions. Otherwise it cannot ever be considered as a profession in its own
right. Thus far it is an occupation where many simply follow the edicts of
their personality. Many managers simply are not aware that what they are doing
is counterproductive.

Sankaran, S, Hase, S, Dick, B & Davies, A.T. (2007), Singing different tunes from the same song sheet: four perspectives of teaching the doing of action research. Action Learning: Research and Practice, 5(3), 293-30.

Sankaran, G., Hase, S. & Sankaran, S. (2006), What Impact will the Research Quality Framework have on Knowledge Production and Diffusion in Australia’s New Generation Universities? International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management. 6(2), 55-62.

Hase, S., Phelps, R., Saenger, H., & Gordon-Thomson, J.,(2004). Sun, Surf and Scrub: Dimensions of Social Disadvantage in Communities in the Northern Rivers Region of NSW. The Australasian Journal of Business and Social Inquiry, 2(1). Available at http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/socialsciences/ajbsi/?menu=3_34/.

Hase, S. & Kenyon, C. (2003, September 25-27). Heutagogy and developing capable people and capable workplaces: Strategies for dealing with complexity. Proceedings of The Changing Face of Work and Learning conference, Alberta, Sept 25-27. Available at http://www.wln.ualberta.ca/events_con03_proc.htm.